Professor Benzion Netanyahu

Professor Benzion Netanyahu, who has died aged 102, was the ardent Right-wing
father of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, and
advocated no compromise in the struggle with the Palestinians.

Benzion Netanyahu and his son BenjaminPhoto: EPA

6:22PM BST 30 Apr 2012

Like his father, the younger Netanyahu is an arch security “hawk” – he leads the conservative Likud party and recently talked up the possibility of a military campaign against Iran. But despite the influence he may have had, Benzion Netanyahu was a frequent critic of his son as a politician, telling one interviewer: “Bibi didn’t succeed in his first term [as Prime Minister from 1996 to 1999]. He wasn’t a very good prime minister.”

Sceptical about the prospects of peace in the region, Benzion Netanyahu once observed: “The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump to the river ... The strong goat will make the weaker one jump ... and I believe that Jewish power will prevail.”

As for the idea of creating a Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel — a notion which his son accepted in 2009 — Benzion Netanyahu said: “The two state solution doesn’t exist ... There are no two people here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population ... there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation ... they only call themselves people in order to fight the Jews.”

He was born Benzion Mileikowsky in Warsaw on March 25 1910, the eldest of nine children of Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, a Zionist scholar and writer who often signed his pieces with the Hebrew name “Netanyahu”, a common practice at the time. Benzion would later formally adopt it.

Aged 10, Benzion emigrated with his parents to Palestine, then under British rule, and the family eventually settled in Jerusalem, where he was sent to a boarding school. He was later trained as a teacher and, in 1929, enrolled as a student at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, gaining his Master’s degree in History in 1933.

During this period Netanyahu was active in Revisionist Zionism, inspired by the ideas of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, who criticised the moderate policies of the Zionists towards the British Mandate in Palestine. He edited the Revisionist Zionist daily newspaper Ha’yarden, which the British authorities closed down in 1935, accusing it of inciting anti-Arab feelings.

In 1939 Netanyahu travelled to New York, where he became Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s secretary. When his mentor died in August the following year, he remained in New York and in the 1940s served there as executive director of the American wing of the Revisionist Zionists.

In 1947 he gained his doctorate in History from Dropsie College in Philadelphia, a small and relatively poor institution, but one where he could study without paying tuition fees.

On November 29 1947 the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. In response Netanyahu — who held that the Jewish claim to the entire area was unquestionable and non-negotiable — signed a petition against the plan. It was published over half a page in The New York Times.

In 1949 Netanyahu returned to Israel, but his Right-wing views were seen as an obstacle to his progress, and he failed to get a suitable teaching job at a time when many institutions were controlled by officials from the rival Labour movement. Instead he became involved in editing the Encyclopedia Hebraica, of which he later became editor-in-chief.

He returned to the United States in 1962, establishing himself as a prominent historian of Medieval Spanish Jewry, and in subsequent years the Netanyahus would shuttle between Israel and America.

In 1976 Netanyahu’s eldest son, Yonatan, was killed leading the commando raid to free Jewish hostages at Entebbe, Uganda. Two years later the Netanyahus decided to return permanently to Israel.

As sharp as a nail and outspoken with it, Benzion Netanyahu remained politically active well into his nineties. He strongly opposed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to disengage unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in 2005, calling the move “a crime against humanity”.

He served as general editor of the World History of the Jewish People and co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. His books included Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (2001) and The Origins of Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain (2002).

Netanyahu was a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research; a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes y Ciencias Históricas in Spain; and a professor emeritus at Cornell University.

Benzion Netanyahu married, in 1944, Tsilah Segal, whom he met in the 1930s at the Hebrew University. She died in 2000, and he is survived by his sons Benjamin and Iddo.